I'm 33. I think I started buying my own game CDs in 1997, probably with Final Fantasy VII followed by tracking down damn near every SquareSoft release on CD. I started out with places like Game Cave, Game Music Online, and a shady local dealer who sold me SonMay CDs before I knew they were bootlegs. Once I discovered The Place, I replaced everything with legitimate copies. I later migrated to CD Japan, then to VGM World, and now I'm back to CD Japan (with sprinkles of Amazon Japan and plenty of Jerold mixed in). I still buy a fair amount of game music CDs, but I'm not as much of a collector as I used to be since I no longer try to hunt down every single and promo album for each series that I follow. When the yen was at 120, I could do that, but now it's just too expensive to try to get everything.

Also, I'm not surprised to see that we're all old. Kids these days didn't grow up with CDs, and the idea of paying $30 for an album must seem completely absurd to them. Hell, the concept of an "album" must seem even more absurd.

Yes. I also think that we are used to the instant gratification of downloading and internet in general. For many it's too much of a hassle to hunt for old CDs or even order stuff from overseas.

I'm 23 and have grown up in the digital age. Though I never collected VGM albums, I did collect other CDs and DVDs. But I've sold or given away everything long ago and never buy physical stuff, unless there is no other way.

By the time I could order stuff online at the age of 15-16, it was already 2004-2005 and downloading was so easy. Whenever I bought a CD, I would enjoy reading the booklet and looking at the cover once. After that it just gathered dust. And ripping & tagging was so slow, that I just pirated the CD instead. Often the physical CD never even went inside a CD player. CDs just took lots of space and after moving out of my parents' house to go to college, the CDs/DVDs felt like such a burden to carry around. Now I'm kind of a minimalist and I would never go back to owning lots of stuff. Especially since I've moved over a dozen times in my life.

MIDI files came before torrents and they got at least me more interested in VGM. I found some FF MIDI files on a Finnish site and was blown away by being able to listen to the music outside the game. Someone on a forum linked to the The Black Mages website with previews. That was THE moment for me. I was 13. I think I only knew of MIDI stuff before that.

Buying stuff legally probably has one really good benefit. I would listen to the albums several times, since my collection would be limited. Now it's basically unlimited and I listen to many albums only once or twice (at least initially).

Someone commented that the older generation grew up during the golden era of gaming. But we also experienced it in a different way. I can't tell you how much fun growing up in this generation was! I played all Final Fantasies up to IX all at the same time in 2000-2001. I played I-VI on emulators, VII & VIII on PC and IX on my cousin's PS1. (FF I-VI never came out in Europe by the way.) This is how it was, switching between our Nintendo consoles (NES, SNES, N64, GC), the emulators, the PC games and my cousin's PS1 games. As a kid, graphics on all consoles were amazing. Even though I had seen FMVs in FF VII, I was blown away by the opening scene in FF VI, where they walk in Magitek suits in a kind of 3D way. I can't even begin to express the jaw-dropping amazingness of Tales of Phantasia's opening vocal theme on the SNES! I couldn't believe they had a human voice on it!

I sleep now.